The trip lasted more than two months, during most of which Hay had little to do except see the sights and occasionally brief the president on the war as it simmered along the southeastern coast. Why he chose to do so, and was permitted to do so, for so long in the midst of what was perhaps the most dismal season of the war and with so much work always to be done in the White House, defies easy explanation. It wasn’t a case of Lincoln playing favorites, either. In the four years of his presidency, he sent Nicolay west on three occasions, always on government business but with ample time for stopovers with his fiancée, who waited out the war at home. The Tycoon, it seems, was simply being nice—and fatherly.
Hay arrived, seasick, at Hilton Head, forty miles south of Charleston, on the morning of April 7, just hours before the naval assault was to commence. The attack was an utter failure. In barely an hour, Confederate guns at Sumter and Moultrie fired more than two thousand shells; the federal ironclads answered with fewer than two hundred rounds before turning tail. Hay was too far away to witness the debacle firsthand, but later he wrote a long letter to Lincoln, asking him not to condemn Admiral Du Pont’s decision to withdraw. Lincoln had feared the worst, Hay reminded him, and something a little less than that had come true. “I hope,” he urged, “that due honor may be given to those who fought with such bravery and discretion the losing fight.” Hay’s tone with the president was not the least bit forward, but it did reveal an intimacy nurtured by a great many hours of easy chatter in the White House, not to mention scores of military pardons.
When Hay finally caught up with his brother Charles a day or so later, he found him gravely sick with pneumonia. For the next two weeks, while General Hunter’s army and Admiral Du Pont’s navy deliberated the feasibility of launching a new attack on Fort Sumter, Hay looked to his brother’s convalescence. “I shall never cease to be thankful that I came as I did,” he wrote to their mother, “for it would have been an even chance, that in another week he would have had his lungs damaged for life.” Despite the navy’s recent setback, he was full of optimism. “All we have to do, is stand firm and have faith in the Republic, and no temporary repulses, no blunders even can prevent our having the victory.” In the meantime, he assured his mother, “I never felt better in my life than I do now.”
He was able to make several excursions with members of Hunter’s staff to inspect the network of Union fortifications that girded the myriad bays, rivers, and sea islands of the South Carolina and Georgia coast. On one occasion he sailed within range of the Confederate batteries at Savannah. When not on board ship, he rode horseback through the sandy lowlands and strolled the gardens of the old plantations. “The air is like June at noon & like May at morning,” he wrote Nicolay. “The sun goes down over the pines through a sky like ashes-of-roses and hangs for an instant on the horizon like a bubble of blood.”
This was his second contact with southern Negroes, and this time he was taken with their dialect. At a prayer meeting at Hilton Head, a young Negro, upon learning that Hay worked for the president, announced that he would like to see “Linkum.” Hay would embellish on this anecdote in a speech he gave to northern audiences several years later. He remembered that a “gray-haired patriarch” interrupted the youngster who wished to meet Lincoln. “ ‘No man see Linkum,’ the older Negro said. ‘Linkum walk as Jesus walk. No man see Linkum.’ ”
When Charles’s doctor recommended that sea air might help clear his lungs, the brothers took a boat down the coast as far as St. Augustine. Hay liked Florida even more than South Carolina. “It is the only thing that smells of the Original Eden on the Continent,” he told Nicolay. “I wish I could buy the State for taxes & keep it for a Castle of Indolence.”
In fact, during his weeklong stay he arranged to buy an orange grove in St. Augustine for $500. The previous owner was away, fighting for the Confederacy; under the Confiscation Act, his land had been auctioned by federally appointed tax commissioners. Hay was told that he would earn back his investment fivefold in the first year’s harvest. “The soil is almost as rich as our prairie land,” he exclaimed to his grandfather. “All sorts of fruit and grain grow with very little cultivation, and fish and game of every kind abound.”
Like his father and grandfathers, whose land speculations had spared them callused hands, he could already picture life as a gentleman planter after the war: “As we sat in the shade at St. Augustine . . . I felt as useless and irresponsible as the lizards in the grass or the porpoises that leaped in the liquid basin of the bay,” he wrote Nicolay. “The memory of a land where people worked, was as dim and distant as the dream of home to the enchanted mariners sleeping beneath the whispering pines of the Lotos Islands.” So enthralled was he by the prospect of agrarian idyll that on the way home with Charles he committed to buy several more lots in Fernandina, Florida. To the victor maybe would go the spoils.
Back in Hilton Head, he grew restive. Admiral Du Pont, having failed once to penetrate Charleston Harbor, was reluctant to run the gauntlet a second time. “There is positively nothing to hope for from the Navy at present,” Hay griped to Nicolay. “The Admiral so dreads failure he cannot think of success. . . . Now is our time to strike them & where they are weak.” But the Confederate defenses at Charleston were far from weak, and despite repeated bombardments and land assaults, Fort Sumter would not fall for another two years, abandoned only when Sherman’s army swept through the South in the final weeks of the war.
Hay had intended to start north in early May, but his brother’s health was not sufficiently improved, and he resolved to take him along; it took another week to secure a medical leave. They did not reach Washington until after June 1; there Charles at last regained his strength. Hay eventually succeeded in getting him assigned as a recruiting officer in Springfield. (Their other brother, Leonard, had enlisted in the infantry and would remain in the army throughout his life, rising to the rank of captain and serving almost entirely in the West.)
At the White House, Hay found the president more beleaguered than when he left. Lincoln had high hopes for Fighting Joe Hooker when in late April he had marched the Army of the Potomac into northern Virginia, crossing the Rappahannock River with the fierce ambition of drawing Lee’s army away from Fredericksburg and into the open. But it was Lee who had made the bolder thrust, dividing his army and flanking Hooker near the town of Chancellorsville. Suddenly Hooker looked a lot like McClellan—taking the defensive too hastily, withholding troops, overestimating the size of the enemy. Hay would later criticize Hooker’s generalship as “vacillating and purposeless.”
News of the army’s defeat and retreat reached Lincoln on May 6. “Had a thunderbolt fallen upon the President he could not have been more overwhelmed,” wrote the journalist Noah Brooks, who was in the White House at the time. “One newly risen from the dead could not have been more ghostlike.” Secretary of War Stanton allowed to Hay that this was “the darkest day of the war. It seems as if the bottom had dropped out.”
But Lincoln soon composed himself, lifted by Grant’s conquest of Port Gibson on the Mississippi and the tightening of the noose around Vicksburg. The Army of the Potomac might have been whipped at Chancellorsville, but the Confederacy had lost a greater portion of its army, including one of its most revered generals, Stonewall Jackson. Lincoln looked into the faces of the federal soldiers retreating from Virginia and found their spirits surprisingly resilient. “All accounts agree,” the New York Times reported, “that the troops on the Rappahannock came out of their late bloody fight game to the backbone . . . undaunted and erect, composed and ready to turn on the instant and follow their leaders back into the fray.”
But the Army of the Potomac would have to carry on without Hooker, who resigned on June 27. “We need not recapitulate the fatal errors . . . to show that Hooker’s reputation as a great commander could not possibly survive his defeat at Chancellorsville,” Hay was to write in the Lincoln biography. “He threw away his chances one by one.”
A week after
Hooker’s departure, his army got another shot at Lee, who had seized the momentum of Chancellorsville and once again was taking the fight northward onto Union soil, through Maryland into Pennsylvania, angling toward Harrisburg and, God willing, perhaps even Philadelphia.
Lee’s new opponent was General George Meade, whom Hay described as a “tall, thin, reserved man, very near-sighted, with the air of a student rather than of the sabreur.” Meade had spent the years before the war building lighthouses and thus far in battle had acquitted himself well, even while his fellow generals were stumbling, from Second Bull Run to Chancellorsville. As a Pennsylvanian, he had the added incentive of defending his home state from invasion.
And so Meade’s Army of the Potomac and Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia converged on Gettysburg. “[T]hese two formidable armies were approaching each other at their utmost speed,” Hay was to recount, “driven by the irresistible laws of human action—or, let us reverently say, by the hand of Providence—as unconscious of their point of meeting as two great thunderclouds, big with incalculable lightnings, lashed across the skies by tempestuous winds.”
THE BATTLE RAGED FOR three days, until July 3, when Pickett’s Charge upon Cemetery Ridge ended in thorough slaughter, destroying likewise the Confederacy’s dream of northern conquest.
News from the front dribbled into Washington on a patchy telegraph line. Years later, Hay succeeded in splicing the pieces together in one of the longest chapters of the Lincoln volumes. Of the great rebel charge, he wrote, summoning the rhapsody of Thucydides or Tennyson, “No sight so beautiful in a soldier’s eyes, so full of the pomp and circumstance of glorious war, had ever before been seen upon this continent, as when Pickett led forth his troops from behind the ridge, where they had lain concealed, and formed them in column for attack. There was nothing like it possible in the swamps of the Chickahominy, or the tangled thickets of the Rappahannock, or on the wooded shores of the Rapidan. There no enemy was visible half a musket-shot away; but here, at a distance of nearly a mile across a cultivated valley, part of which was covered with waving grain and part smooth in stubble fields, the whole irradiated with the unclouded beams of the July sun, an army formed itself in line of battle under the eyes of an appreciative adversary. It came on across the valley in the form of a wedge, of which Pickett’s own division about 5000 strong formed the finely tempered point.”
Hay had not witnessed any phase of the fighting, but he was aided by a visit to the battlefield later in the year when Lincoln made his memorable remarks in recognition of the soldiers who “gave the last full measure of devotion” to the nation. The North and South each suffered twenty-three thousand killed and wounded at Gettysburg, but it was the rebels who paid the bigger price, for their army never regained the strength or esprit that Lee had carried forward from Chancellorsville.
Vicksburg’s surrender to Grant on July 4 dimmed Confederate prospects even more. “There were still two years of labor, and toil, and bloodshed before the end came,” Hay would write, “but the war reached its crisis and the fate of the rebellion was no longer doubtful from that hour,” when Grant sat “beneath the oak tree on the hillside of Vicksburg, and Pickett’s veterans were reeling back, baffled and broken by the guns of Meade at Gettysburg.”
For a fleeting moment the residents of the White House allowed themselves to believe that the war might be over—provided Meade pursued the mangled Army of Northern Virginia and destroyed it before it could get away. “The President seemed in a specially good humor today,” Hay wrote in his diary on July 11, “as he had pretty good evidence that the enemy were still on the North side of the Potomac and Meade had announced his intention of attacking them in the morning.”
But the Union troops had their own wounds to lick and no lust for the chase. By the fourteenth, Lee had slipped across the river to relative safety, and Lincoln was beside himself with frustration. “ ‘Our Army held the war in the hollow of their hand & they would not close it,’ ” Lincoln lamented to Hay. “ ‘We had gone through all the labor of tilling & planting an enormous crop & when it was ripe we did not harvest it.’ ”
As always, the president maintained his equilibrium, and, over all, Hay’s letters and diary began to reflect a resurgence of vitality and optimism, some of which was Lincoln’s, some his own. To be sure, many obstacles remained: the South still had plenty of fight left in it; the so-called Peace Democrats were escalating their corrosive demonstrations against the administration; and draft riots had ravaged New York. All the while, the cabinet continued to feud, and Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase had set his sights on Lincoln’s job. Even so, the president’s mood was noticeably improved. “The Tycoon is in fine whack,” Hay wrote Nicolay, who was away on one of his western junkets. “He is managing this war, the draft, foreign relations, and planning a reconstruction of the Union, all at once. I never knew with what tyrannous authority he rules the Cabinet, till now. The most important things he decides & there is no cavil. I am growing more and more firmly convinced that the good of the country absolutely demands that he should be kept where he is till the thing is over. There is no man in the country, so wise so gentle and so firm. I believe the hand of God placed him where he is.”
In particular, Hay recognized the singular brilliance and strength of Lincoln’s military leadership. In March 1862, when the naval duel between the ironclads Monitor and Merrimac hung in the balance, Hay had observed: “Lincoln was, as usual in trying moments, composed but eagerly inquisitive, critically scanning the dispatches, interrogating the officers, joining scrap to scrap of information, applying his searching analysis and clear logic to read the danger and find the remedy.” And after Meade balked in the aftermath of Gettysburg, Lincoln had declared to Hay, “If I had gone up there I could have whipped them myself.” Hay had no doubt that Lincoln could have done so.
When it came to specific orders, Hay noticed that Lincoln’s “were always clearer and more definite than any he received from [his generals].” And to those who wished that Lincoln would “keep his fingers out of the military pie,” Hay protested: “The truth is, if he did, the pie would be a sorry mess. The old man sits here and wields like a backwoods Jupiter the bolts of war and the machinery of government with a hand equally steady & equally firm.”
If Hay had any last, lingering reservations about Lincoln’s infallibility, they now evaporated like the morning haze on the Potomac. “I have to a great extent stopped questioning where I don’t agree with him, content with trusting to his instinct of the necessities of the time and the wants of the people,” he wrote to Charles Halpine, a friend on General Hunter’s staff. “I hardly ever speak of him to others than you, because people generally would say ‘Yes! of course: that’s how he gets his daily bread!’ I believe he will fill a bigger place in history than he ever dreams of himself.”
Hay’s ever-deepening faith in the president, and the president’s evident resilience, helped explain why he seemed so much more relaxed after returning from South Carolina and Florida. A week after Lee’s escape from Meade, Hay mentioned that he and Robert Lincoln, who was on vacation from Harvard, “had a fearful orgie here last night on whiskey and cheese.” Over the remainder of the summer Hay made frequent visits to the Soldiers’ Home, rocking on the porch in the sultry air, discussing philology and reading Shakespeare with the president and swapping yarns from back home, many of which were “unfit for family reading,” Hay disclosed to Charles Halpine.
He also shared his recent poems with Lincoln, prompting the president to try one himself, a snippet of doggerel written shortly after Gettysburg in the voice of Robert E. Lee. (“Jeff” of course is Confederate president Jefferson Davis.)
In eighteen hundred sixty-three,
With pomp and mighty swell,
Me and Jeff’s confederacie
Went forth to sack Phil-del.
The Yankees they got arter us,
And gin us particilar h_ll,
And we skedaddled back again,
And didn’t sack Phil-del.
SUCH LIGHTHEARTEDNESS DID NOT permeate the entire White House, however. Hay and Nicolay were crosswise with Mary Todd Lincoln from the start. Her husband was the Tycoon, but she was “the Hell-Cat.” When one of the secretaries was away, the other would report on the first lady’s latest demonstrations of distemper, dishonesty, and general contrariness. “Madame has mounted me to pay her the Steward’s salary. I told her to kiss mine,” Hay snarled in one letter to Nicolay. After Nicolay clashed with “the powers at the other end of the hall” over a slight matter of protocol concerning invitations to a White House dinner, “there soon arose such a rampage as the House hasn’t seen for a year,” he told Hay, “and I am again taboo.”
In hindsight, it is a testament to Hay’s and Nicolay’s devotion to Lincoln that they were not more openly antagonistic toward his wife. She was in many ways Lincoln’s opposite—short, vain, devious. In her diamonds, décolletage, and queenly airs, she modeled herself after the empress Eugénie of France. Hay and Nicolay viewed firsthand the string of scandals and near scandals that Mrs. Lincoln hatched seemingly without compunction or concern for the president’s reputation. The secretaries were supposed to be the gatekeepers to the president’s office, yet Mrs. Lincoln met with office-seekers and lobbyists on her own, promising them jobs and influence and on more than one occasion accepting bribes for these indulgences. They resented the way she leaked secrets and waylaid members of the cabinet and Congress to press on them her own political or patronage demands. The secretaries surely were aware of the séances she held in the presidential quarters after Willie died. What appalled them more than her profligacy—eighty-four pairs of gloves in one month, thousands of dollars in jewelry, and the horrendous overrun in redecorating the White House—was the way she went about hiding her exorbitant expenses in false or padded bills that she attempted to charge to the federal government.
All the Great Prizes Page 9